Contributors

Ken Feltman, moderator

Ken Feltman is the retired Chairman of Radnor Inc., a political consulting and legislative relations firm in Washington, D.C., that has affiliations with political and legislative firms throughout the world. Radnor advises foreign corporations on U.S. legislative and political issues and assists U.S. businesses in coordinating business objectives with legislative and political goals.

Radnor has worked with 45 of the largest corporations in the world and Feltman has worked with successful presidential candidates in the United States, France and Georgia. He has advised candidates in 29 countries throughout the world.

Before founding Radnor in 1985, Feltman directed legislative and political activity as a Vice President of the National Association of Manufacturers. He ran successful political campaigns at the U.S. Senate and House level and was involved in fundraising and campaign management for over 200 Senate and House members, including Everett McKinley Dirksen, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

Feltman is the only person to be a Past-President of the International Association of Political Consultants (IAPC) and a Past-President of the American League of Lobbyists. He is Co-Chair of the Capital Access Forum, a group that works with large financial institutions and the U.S. Department of Commerce to provide funding and assistance to small and minority businesses. He founded Veterans1, a veterans service organization, in 2003 (Veterans1.org).

Educated at Northwestern University, Feltman has lectured or taught courses at several colleges and universities, including the University of Alabama at Birmingham, American University, Cambridge University, Columbia University, George Washington University, Harvard University, Howard University, the University of Michigan, Northwestern University Law School, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas and the University of West Florida.

He has appeared on every U.S. over-the-air television network, the BBC, CBC, CNN, C-SPAN and several radio or television stations in Austria, Canada, Egypt, France, Hungary, the Republic of Georgia, Russia, South Africa, Spain and the United States. He was the regular Washington commentator for International Investor television for three years.

Feltman founded the U.S. and European Conflict Indexes in 1988. The indexes have predicted the winner of every U.S. presidential election beginning in 1988, plus the outcome of several European elections.

In May of 2010, the Conflict Index was used by university students in Egypt. The Index predicted the fall of the Mubarak government within the next year.

Professor Egorova, a Radnor Reports author, is founder and president of the “Niccolo M” Group, one of the leading Russian companies in political consulting and public relations. She has managed and advised political campaigns throughout Russia and in the West, including the United States.

She served as personal political consultant to President Boris Yeltsin. She is credited with creating the Russian concept of the psychology of political leadership and leaders. Prof. Egorova has published several books, e.g. “One Cannot be Born a Politician: How to become an Effective Political Leader”, 1993• “Image of the Leader”, 1994 • “Political Consultant “Political Advertising” (1999), “Political Consulting” (2002) and “Games with Toy Soldiers. Political Psychology of Presidents” (Including President Bush 43) (2004), “In the Fog of War: Offensive Military Communicative Technologies” (2010).

Prof. Egorova is a member of the American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC), European Association of Political Consultants (EAPC), International Association of Political Consultants (IAPC), International Public Relations Association (IPRA), Counselors Academy, Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), and the Russian Public Relations Association (RPRA). She resides in Washington and Moscow.

Professor Walid Phares serves as an Advisor to the Anti-Terrorism Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives and is a Co-Secretary General of the Transatlantic Legislative Group on Counter Terrorism, a Euro-American Caucus, since 2009. Dr. Walid Phares briefs and testifies to the US Congress, the European Parliament and the United Nations Security Council on matters related to international security and Middle East conflict. He consults with and lectures several national security and defense agencies as well as to Counter Terrorism advisory boards in North America and Europe.

He has served on the Advisory Board of the Task Force on Future Terrorism of the Department of Homeland Security in 2006-2007 as well as on the Advisory Task force on Nuclear Terrorism in 2007.

Dr Phares teaches Global Strategies at the National Defense University since 2006. Previously he was a Professor of Middle East Studies and Comparative Politics at Florida Atlantic University 1993-2004.

He has published several books in English, Arabic and French including the latest three post 9/11 volumes: Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against the West; The War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracy and The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad.

His most recent timely book (December 2010) is “The Coming Revolution: Struggle for Freedom in the Middle East” which projected the uprisings in the region before they occurred.

Michael Granger is a pioneer in working to provide capital to minority and underserved businesses. He coined the term domestic emerging markets to recognize the emerging businesses in the U.S. economy that lacked access to capital. Mr. Granger’s areas of expertise include private equity investments, analysis of technology companies, buyouts, and growth acquisition transactions. Mr. Granger has been an active private equity professional for the past two decades, focusing on acquisitions for investment purposes and integration of businesses. Since 1985, he has worked with Cigna Venture Capital and Xerox Venture Capital, before founding his own firm, Ark Capital Management in 1992.

He also served four years of active duty in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Vietnam era.

Granger earned his B.S.E.E. from the University of Massachusetts in 1982 and an MBA from Dartmouth College’s Amos Tuck School of Business Administration in 1985.

He is also Founder and Chairman of the Capital Access Forum, a Chicago-based organization designed to improve access to capital for emerging entrepreneurs. Under his leadership, the Forum has had four successful conferences, bringing private equity firms and entrepreneurial companies together. His publications include: Case Study on Hospital Management Companies; an editorial piece in the Wall Street Journal on Capital Gains Tax Reduction; and a Study on Venture Capital Opportunities in the Telecommunication Industry (Tuck Today Magazine). In addition to serving on a White-House panel of industry leaders convened by the President’s Chief Economic Advisors, Granger has also actively participated in numerous other boards and commissions.

Granger is a member of the board of directors of Pennsylvania-based e-LYNXX Corporation, a leader in procurement innovation and management. Earlier this year, e-LYNXX was named one of the top North American procurement firms for the third consecutive year.

Anthony W. (Andy) Hawks has been practicing law for 27 years and is the former President of e-LYNXX Corporation. He is the author of “The Balanced Budget Veto: A New Mechanism to Limit Federal Spending” (Cato Institute; September 2003) and writes regularly on proposed constitutional amendments and the Article V amendment process. He currently lives in Bethany Beach, DE with his wife Patsy, plays tournament bridge, and enjoys hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Mark Q. Rhoads has a strong background in writing, journalism, government affairs, and public relations. He studied at Loyola University of Chicago, The George Washington University, and the American University Graduate School of Government. In 1982 he taught as a Fellow of the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He also served six years in the U.S. Army Reserve where he was editor of a command newspaper in Chicago.

Mr. Rhoads was elected to serve as an Illinois State Senator (R-Cook County) for six years from 1977 to 1983. The Federation of Independent Illinois Colleges and Universities named him Outstanding Legislator for 1979 and he was rated first in the Senate in 1980 by the Taxpayer’s Federation of Illinois.

After re-locating to the Washington, DC area in 1984, Rhoads wrote more than 300 editorials for the Chicago Sun-Times between 1984 and 1987. His op/ed articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, The Washington Times, and Illinois Issues magazine. From 2000 to 2003, he was a frequent op/ed contributor to the UPI Outside Views syndicated service. He had also ghost written op/eds, radio commentaries, and speeches.

He has been a guest on more than 200 radio and TV programs including Good Morning America on ABC-TV, The Nightly Business Report on PBS, and Weekend Report on CNN. He has managed Rhoads & Associates Public Relations Consulting in Washington, DC since 1987. He partnered with Emmy Award-winning reporter and former NBC Today Show co-host Jim Hartz to produce cable and public TV specials such as The Midwest Economic Summit in 1987 and Red Ink Nightmare in 1990. He also produced and co-hosted with the late Sen. Paul Simon a 1993 program NAFTA trade issues for Illinois PBS stations.

Mark Rhoads was Vice President of the United States Internet Council from 1996 to 2002. He supervised editing for the 1999, 2000, and 2001 State of the Internet Reports. He has testified before both congressional and state legislative committees and lectured on Internet policy in state capitals,Toronto, andLondon.

Peter E. Feltman has spent 24 years working in Washington. While working for the Chairman of a Senate Banking Subcommittee, he worked on two landmark bills, FIRREA and the FDIC Improvement Act of 1991. He assisted Illinois municipalities, colleges and universities gain federal funding.

Later, as an editor with a leading publisher of financial information, he worked on several key bills, including Dodd-Frank, Sarbanes-Oxley, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, the U.S.A. Patriot Act, bankruptcy measures and various tax issues related to the financial, securities and commodities industries.

Currently, he works for The Economist Group, publisher of Congressional Quarterly, CQ Weekly and Roll Call as well as The Economist.

His work has been cited by a Harvard Business School professor and he has been invited to speak with college journalism students. He is an authority on how policy begins, develops in Congress, is implemented through the agency rulemaking process and, finally, is subject to court challenges. He has followed a number of issues from their introduction in Congress, enactment into law, through the agency rulemaking process and all the way to the Supreme Court.

He has interviewed key policy makers including members of Congress, senior officials at the Treasury Department, the heads of the SEC, the FDIC, the CFTC and various trade associations.

Educated at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, Oxford University’s New College and Johns Hopkins University, he has appeared on television to discuss financial issues because of his expertise in antitrust, energy, government contracts, intellectual property, international financial accounting standards, and European financial regulations.

Hm. I read some of the articles a while ago somewhere else and then lost track of you. Glad to find you again. There’s one that isn’t here. Something about the first Bush and his insecurities. Do you have that somewhere?

You folks do excellent work. Not only that, you write with such feeling. I could taste the gumbo in your articles about New Orleans after Katrina. I felt Nancy Pelosi’s cold knife stabbing her political foes in the back. I felt the joy of your teacher at a patch of sunlight and fresh strawberries.